xtsigs writes: Honda's NeuV will employ, ""a concept automated EV commuter vehicle equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) called 'emotion engine' that creates new possibilities for human interaction and new value for customers."
Time to consider how to provide therapy to all those potentially neurotic cars as per Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"Modern elevators are strange and complex entities... a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter... [are] imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced its largest ever wind energy deal to power its cloud data center facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The company signed two agreements to purchase 237 megawatts of wind energy from projects based in Kansas and Wyoming, with the tech giant’s total investment in wind energy now amounting to over 500 megawatts — in addition to renewable energy bought from the grid including wind, solar, and hydro-power.

An anonymous reader writes: Google Research has developed a new image upscaling technique called Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution (RAISR), which uses low and high resolution versions of photos in a standard image set to establish templated paths for upward scaling of an image. This effectively uses historical logic, instead of pixel interpolation, to infer what the image would look like if it had been taken at a higher resolution. It's notable that neither the initial paper nor the supplementary examples feature human faces. It could be argued that using AI-driven techniques to reconstruct images raises some questions about whether upscaled,machine-driven digital enhancements are a legal risk, compared to the far greater expense of upgrading low-res CCTV networks with the necessary resolution, bandwidth and storage to obtain good quality video evidence.

Would it be more or less insulting if I said basic arithmetic instead of civics? A tiny state like New Hampshire cannot "dictate the president of the entire country." If it could, nobody in any other state would bother voting. Those small states are "swing states" because they can "swing" a close election one way or the other -- which is tie breaking, not "dictating." A logic course wouldn't hurt the civics and mathematics courses. If you strengthen your powers of deductive reasoning, you won't need such simple concepts spelled out for you step by step so often.

donagilbert writes: AT&T, one of the largest telecommunications brands in the country, has successfully signed an agreement with one of the most famous names in music industry, Taylor Swift. This recent deal will allow both AT&T and Taylor Swift to appear in numerous events together. This also includes the AT&T DirecTV Super Saturday Night, which will be held in Houston, Texas on February 4, 2017.

An anonymous reader writes: Private space companies may soon get the opportunity to add their own habitat modules to the outside of the International Space Station. That’s according to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who announced the new initiative today as a way to help expand the number of companies and people that can do work and research in space. That can eventually help companies gain the experience and capability to create private space stations of their own. "A vibrant user community will be key to ensuring the economic viability of future space stations," wrote Bolden in a White House blog post. The announcement of this new opportunity comes just a few months after NASA asked private companies for ideas of how they might use one of the docking ports on the ISS. Based on the responses NASA received, Bolden said companies had a "strong desire" to attach commercial modules to the station that could benefit both NASA and the private sector. Bolden didn’t specify which companies expressed interest, but one company in particular, Bigelow Aerospace, has been very vocal about its desire to hook up habitats to the ISS; the company wants to attach its next big inflatable habitat, the B330, to the ISS as early as 2020. One of Bigelow’s experimental habitats is already connected to the ISS, though its stay is only temporary and meant to gather data about Bigelow’s habitat technology. While the new ISS initiative is meant to foster innovation in the private sector, it will also presumably help jumpstart the space station’s transition from a state-run project to one helmed by the private sector. The ISS is set to retire in 2024, and NASA is looking to move beyond lower Earth orbit and send humans to Mars by the mid-2030s. But before NASA abandons the ISS, the space agency wants to leave the orbiting lab in some private company’s capable hands. "Ultimately, our desire is to hand the space station over to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-Earth orbit," Bill Hill, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for Exploration Systems Development, said at a press conference in August.

ChelleChelle2 writes: As many software engineers are only too well aware, designing software for modern multicore processors can be quite a challenge. Traditional software designs (in which threads manipulate shared data) have limited scalability because synchronization of updates to shared data serializes threads and limits parallelism. However, alternative distributed software designs (in which threads do NOT share mutable data), while eliminating synchronization and offering better scalability, pose their own problems and are not a good fit for every program. Luckily, ACM Queue recently published a very useful guide describing advanced synchronization methods that can boost the performance of multicore software.

Tasha26 writes: After waiting 2 years to inform their users that 1 billion of them had their details stolen and installing a modified email scanner which turned out to be an NSA rootkit with full backdoor access, Yahoo has now disabled automatic email forwarding to another email provider. Users are claiming that this is an extremely suspicious timing as automatic email forwarding has been around for over a decade. In a statement to the BBC, Yahoo has denied any foul play and instead claimed they were working to improve the email forwarding functionality.

schwit1 writes: The Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, having lost most of its government funding, has switched to a private model where they compete for customers on the open market.

[T]hey petitioned to retain a fraction of NSF funding and make up the difference with private contracts-a model then unheard of. Eventually, the NSF agreed to fund about 60 percent of Green Bank's operations in 2017, tapering to 30 percent in 2018.

To add cash flow to that federal tributary, Green Bankers had to nail down private contracts. The 140-foot telescope, home to the biggest ball bearing in the world, will download data from the Russian Space Agency's on-orbit radio telescope, RadioAstron, which will also hook up with the newer telescope to form a high-resolution array. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves has commissioned the flagship Green Bank Telescope to watch their network of pulsars for fingerprints of gravitational waves.

And Breakthrough Listen-a search for extraterrestrial intelligence-will look for the technological fingerprints of aliens. The project, funded by rich-guy Yuri Milner, will watch the sky 1,300 hours a year, debiting $2 million from Milner annually and depositing it into Green Bank's coffers.

In other words, they are marketing the telescope to the open market, selling time to use it to whoever has a need. And apparently, there is a need, though like most operations that go public to private, the telescope will have to become leaner and meaner and more efficient to stay in the black. Which is to the good.Link to Original Source

whoever57 writes: The CEO of Backpage was recently arrested for "pimping". It is likely that the charges will not stick because of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), under which publishers are protected from liability for the postings of their users. However, this could just be the first shot in the battle to weaken section 230. . This could endanger other sites, such as Craigslist, and ultimately, any site with user-written content.

Part of the problem is that once your card details are stolen — whether through a phishing attack or by someone copying the digits on the back — fraudsters are free to go on a spending spree until you notice something's up. Normally by the time you get around to actually cancelling your card, it's all too late.

But what if the numbers on your card changed every hour so that, even if a fraudster copied them, they'd quickly be out of date? That's exactly what two French banks are starting to do with their new high-tech ebank cards.

The three digits on the back of this card will change, every hour, for three years and after they change, the previous three digits are essentially worthless, and that's a huge blow for criminals.Link to Original Source

sciencehabit writes: Earlier this year, the Cassini spacecraft screwed up an orbital maneuver at Saturn because of a problem with its radio connection to Earth. The incident was one of several recent glitches in the Deep Space Network (DSN), NASA’s complex of large radio antennas in California, Spain, and Australia. For more than 50 years, the DSN has been the lifeline for nearly every spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit, relaying commands from mission control and receiving data from the distant probe. On 30 September, in a meeting at NASA headquarters, officials will brief planetary scientists on the network’s status. Many are worried, based on anecdotal reports, that budget cuts and age have taken a toll that could endanger the complex maneuvers that Cassini and Juno, a spacecraft now at Jupiter, will require over the next year.

Tracking Protection arrived with Firefox 42 last November, giving users control over what types of data third parties received from their browsing. This could mean certain online advertisements might not display properly.

However until now, Tracking Protection has been limited to private browsing. Mozilla is looking at extending this protection to all tabs but first needs to see where the feature “breaks” the web – this includes ads.

To achieve this, it is inviting users to participate in a ‘Test Pilot’, a scheme which sees Firefox users test experimental features in the early stage of development.